This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To... into solar panels because of their high efficiency and low cost. The problem is, perovskites are...
MIT created solar panel stickers you can use in disaster relief or on drones for immediate power
MIT engineers built a solar-powered desalination system that produces large quantities of clean water despite variations in sunlight throughout the day. Because it requires no extra batteries, it o...
Solar cells that combine traditional silicon with cutting-edge perovskites could push the efficiency of solar panels to new heights.
Now that solar has been a widespread, mainstream source of energy for a few decades, many solar panels are reaching the end of their lifetimes. Ideally, we’d want these clean energy technologies, which have played a huge role in slowing the pace of climate change, to be just as benign when they’re done harvesting the power of the sun. But that’s not often the case, says Meng Tao, professor at Arizona State University who studies terawatt-scale solar technologies. It turns out that what mak...
A new plant in France aims to extract silver from old solar panels to make recycling them worth the trouble.
Now, MIT researchers have devised a waterless, no-contact system to automatically clean solar panels or the mirrors of solar thermal plants. The new system uses electrostatic repulsion to...
Dust that accumulates on solar panels is a major problem, but washing the panels uses huge amounts of water. MIT engineers have now developed a waterless cleaning method to remove dust on solar ins...
An ultra-thin solar cell material is one-hundredth the weight of conventional panels, while also potentially generating 18 times more power.
MIT researchers developed a scalable fabrication technique to produce ultrathin, flexible, durable, lightweight solar cells that can be stuck to any surface. Glued to high-strength fabric, the sola...